The Blog

You will be pleased to note...

...that I just paid my bill and will remain at this url for another two years. This is good.

If anyone has visited the site recently, you'll note a mess of broken links and odd formatting. Apologies, I'm working on it in what little free time I have at the moment.

And since I'm here I might as well blog this column and this video are my favourite web things from the last week.

Labels: chasing after butterflies and wishing I could fly, lonely-Cat, politics, random, retail therapy, still poor, wasting my life, web stuff

   I'm glad I'm not the only one...

So I've been watching the West Wing recently. And I finally made it up to the last series, which is all about the election of the next president. Go the democrats, etc.

But the thing that has struck me most about the final series has been the way that life has been imitating art. For one thing, the the republican nominee is a liberal and unliked by the hardcore conservatives. For another, the democrats were split between a former resident of the white house and a minor congressman who happens to belong to a racial minority, at least until the convention.

This morning I got online to see if I could find any fun political discussions of this, and instead I find out that the character of the eventual democratic nominee (Matt Santos, played by Bail Organa and all around sex god) was "based on Barrack Obama".

I'm not sure what else to say about that, but I thought some of you (Mum, Dev) might like the link.

Labels: politics, the west wing, tv

   Beto said I sounded too happy in my last blog...

So here's grumpy-Catherine in full force.

In my few free hours a week I tutor people. It's a grand and noble profession, and I get to charge $50 an hour for it. Which is $20 more than the university pays me for teaching, so it's worth my while to tutor. And I like the thrill of seeing someone's eyes light up as they finally *get* something. It's a rush.

But the problem is that the people I tutor expect me to be on call. They email me at all hours, and expect immediate responses. Sometimes they will email me five or six times an hour, regardless of whether or not I'm responding. I don't get paid for any of the time that I spend reading and replying to these emails, but that's okay, because when you get right down to it, I like what I do.

The problem I have is that I'm not appreciated.

Last night I got six emails from one of the students I tutor. All in netspeak, with terrible grammar and spelling. One sentence ("If I can get quest 6 and 7 out then imp rob ok…") had to be read eight times before I could translated what he meant ("If I can get questions 6 and 7 out then I'm probably okay"). He included attached scans of the working he had done on the assignment, but he hadn't even bothered to rotate them so they were all upside down.

Please people. Show me some respect! I'm good at this stuff, but I am not going to put up with being treated that rudely.

And to get your mind off my rant and (possibly misguided) sense of entitlement, here's a brilliant political essay by Charles P. Pierce: Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Labels: grumpyCat, imp rob ok, politics, tutoring